Comments Locked

54 Comments

Back to Article

  • ddriver - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Why is it "Pro"? Performance - nope, endurance - nope, warranty - nope, sounds better - nailed it.

    HP's brand new Pro bested by Samsung's ancient Evo...
  • MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    It's better than the 700 non-Pro, so it warrants that in relation to its other counterpart.
  • mooninite - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    You nailed it. Unfortunately HP will sell units because 1) they'll ship them in their own systems they sell and 2) they have blindly loyal customers.
  • MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    I assume that's why HP went to the trouble of making an SSD? :P
  • syxbit - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Making? They're not making anything here. They're repackaging another company's engineering efforts.
  • Samus - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    The only blindly loyal customers out there are Lenovo's. On the whole, HP's mid-high end systems are the best on the market. Both companies...all companies, make crap at the low end. The business and professional market are where HP just destroys Lenovo is serviceability, reliability, and support. Lenovo simply wins on price. That's why people love them. Because they are cheap. And orange.
  • sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    You sound spiteful. Are you hurt because Lenovo took over as the world's top ranking PC manufacturer after Q2 2013? HP has only gone downhill after that because all HP products have been made in China since who knows when.

    There's no company I dislike more than a domestic one with products being made overseas then shipped back and sold at home.
  • barleyguy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    You can't have your cake and eat it too. The reality is that western labor costs about 10 times as much as Chinese labor, and it's a price competitive market. If an HP laptop was built domestically, it would cost hundreds of dollars more, and most people would buy the cheaper one built in China.

    You either get cheap electronics or you get domestic manufacturing. At this point in time, you can't have both.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    -- The reality is that western labor costs about 10 times as much as Chinese labor

    that made a bunch of difference years ago, but if you look at the FRED data, labor has become a vanishingly small part of production cost. if you're relying on bleeding labor to make money, you won't make much money.
  • Alexvrb - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link

    Exactly. Also there are lots of regions of the US where labor is cheap (rural low cost of living parts of RTW states for example). I suspect other factors such as taxes and regulation drive them to move production overseas more so than the hourly rate of workers.
  • sonny73n - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link

    I understand that but where it'll lead us to? Most of things cost much more in the US compared to the same in China - from gasoline to food. A Chinese can cover his living expenses with just $1000/month while it takes at least twice that much for an American. Keep on rising the minimum wage will not solve the problem because we will be left with nothing to produce. Something's really messed up here.
  • demMind - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link

    sonny.. US Companies can afford to pay wages in the US. They just don't want to because executives love their year-over-year bonuses and dividends to grow. So no, prices haven't gone up because of cost of labor, they've gone up because each of us wants as much as we can get for as little extra effort as possible.
  • Fujikoma - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link

    The price wouldn't be that much more. That extra labor savings is balanced by less efficient use of labor, material waste, shipping costs, increased counterfeit products, higher CEO pay and stock payouts if they exist (Apple is a good one for this). When companies moved to China, they did not lower their prices from cheaper labor. They lined their pockets with the extra cash. I worked for over a decade with a major electronics manufacturer invested heavily in China. Nothing but a headache for such a slim margin. That was with a 50X price margin on one of their highest volume products compared to a 12X price margin with the Mexican produced product (selling price relative to claimed materials + labor + storage + packaging + advertising + everything else involved). The higher margin is offset by shipping, defective/poorly made product, counterfeit product and material waste from poor manufacturing setup.
    As to the cheaper labor, that's because the U.S. allows product made from next to slave labor AND product made in environmentally damaging conditions to be imported into this country. Why do you think China has a pollution problem (aside from coal)... less regulation compared to Europe, Canada, Japan and the U.S.
  • Samus - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link

    Sonny, you realize Lenovo lost the crown 2 years ago? They held the #1 spot for 14 quarters. HP has held the #1 spot for 39 quarters since 2006 when they took it from Dell.

    Nobody is hurt...except the Fortune 500 companies that blindly bought into Lenovo based on price, only to have their IT dept advocate for change almost immediately. Which aligns perfectly with the 3 year corporate product cycle and the amount of time Lenovo held the #1 sales edge in North America.

    I'm an IT director, I know first hand the outcry my community had over Lenovo, and not just in relation to superfish.
  • petar_b - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link

    I don't stand any of these big players HP, Lenovo.... It's all rip off, Lenovo's licensing is too complicated (can't activate features you paid for on hardware that they consider obsolete) and then on HP side plenty of similar crap. You almost feel bad for asking for something you own/deserve/paid.... I love SunMicro, chenbro, clean LSI or Adaptec works with everything. What HP SSD, that one will be backed by warranty only if attached to their mobo, or whatever other stupidity...
  • Flunk - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Marketing terms are always meaningless without context. You always need to read the specs behind the glossy advertising to know what you're buying. I don't see that changing any time soon.
  • MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Agreed
  • yankeeDDL - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    I'm shocked by the price. Dramless, with those specs, should be $70, top, for the 240GB.
    Why in the world would I spend no less than $116, when the EVO sells for $90?!?!?!
  • Glock24 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Just what I was thinking. Pricing on these are ridiculous. They have a bit more storage size, but so does the Crucial MX300 and it's also way cheaper and faster!
  • Samus - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    The MX300 is pretty much the only economy drive to consider outside of an 850 EVO IMHO. Even if these sell for half the retail price, they aren't worth it. You can just pickup an old M500 on eBay (or even an OEM Intel 520/530) for half these prices and have similar performance.
  • sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    You should compare the 850 EVO with the BX300. I don't care whether the EVO has better controller but I will take a 2-bit per cell NAND over a 3-bit any day.
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link

    I just keep picking up lightly used 840 Pro 256GB units, people have forgotten how good they were and still are. It's annoying they no longer appear in review charts. Even the Vertex4 and Vector are still good compared to modern models.
  • barleyguy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    You seem to be comparing retail price to street price. HP has sales almost constantly. These might be $116 initially, but they'll be discounted very quickly to lower prices. I fully expect them to be competitive pricewise.
  • r3loaded - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Hurray, yet another 2017 SSD that gets utterly curbstomped by a Samsung SSD from 2015 on both performance and price.
  • 8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    1. Who is buying SATA SSDs in 2017
    2. Why is Anandtech putting so much effort into SATA SSDs in 2017
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    I've yet to hear from a vendor that their volume of NVMe drives has even come close to matching their volume of SATA drives, for either the retail consumer market or the client OEM market. Even in the enterprise market, NVMe isn't close to killing off SATA and SAS yet.

    We have new technologies launching in SATA products like the Intel 545s and Western Digital's 3D NAND SSDs. SATA SSDs are still more cost effective than NVMe SSDs, and will be until there have been plenty of low-end NVMe controllers like Phison E8 and Silicon Motion SM2263 on the market for quite a while.
  • Elstar - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Also:
    1) most motherboards are still loaded with SATA connectors
    2) most motherboards have few if any NVMe connectors (other than traditional PCIe)
    3) SATA drives are often more friendly to "sneaker net" security.
  • 8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    yes, most motherboards have lots of SATA, but they also have a PCIe m.2 slot... hard to find one that doesn't.

    but who's buying SATA SSDs? It's an honest question.

    on newegg i see a $99 240GB m.2 NVMe SSD, so who would recommend this 256GB SATA drive with a retail price of $169?
  • bji - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Nice straw man. Answer: nobody would buy either. They'd buy a $90 250GB Samsung EVO. I just did last night.
  • cfenton - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link

    Lot's of people don't have motherboards that support m.2. You're right that most new motherboards support m.2, but there are a whole lot of people out there with 2+ year old computers who might want more storage or a faster boot drive. SSDs, of any kind, still aren't common in many OEM products, especially at the low end. A SATA SSD is still going to beat the hell out of any HDD.
  • ddriver - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    1.1 - SATA is OK for most tasks, there will be no perceivable difference to a NVME. Besides some NVME drives are almost as slow as SATA drives, such as the p600.

    1.2 - most boards come with a single M2, those that have more are very expensive, and require expensive CPUs to get actual PCIE lanes

    2 - because HP is paying
  • ddriver - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Even the most expensive mobos have at most 3 m2 slots, so if you want more than 3 SSDs, what do you do then? In contrast, even low end mobos come with at least 4 SATA ports.

    You can get some very decent speed from SSDs in raid 0, on top of the higher capacity, SATA ssds go as high as 4TB, m2 cap out at 2TB.
  • 8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    sure, but do you think most people who can't afford a higher end motherboard are buying more than one SSD for their system?
  • ddriver - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    It depends on what you need. You can save plenty on money on mobo and cpu and spend on much affordable sata ssds. Just because you may need to spend 1000$ on storage doesn't mean you have to be forced to spend another 1000 on cpu and mobo.

    A 2 TB evo will cost you 700$, the cheapest and "onlinest" 2TB m2 drive is 1200$ - over 70% more expensive. The mx300 is even cheaper - you can have a full 4 TB for less than 1200$.
  • yankeeDDL - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Loads of people. I have 3 SATA SSD on my PC and 2 laptops.
    M.2 is still much pricier, so only premium laptop use them, and I find it easier to buy a laptop with a regular HDD, and upgrade it to the SSD of my liking and size. SSD still carry a huge markup on many laptops, and in many cases you cannot even select one which is bigger than 128GB, which is preposterous.
  • sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    I am still buying SATA SSDs for my OCed Sandy Bridge system. Have 3 SSDs in there but I'm considering a big one for storage.
  • evilspoons - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link

    Yep, I've got a friggin GTX 1080 in my i7-2600k and a random collection of hard drives and SSDs populating pretty much every SATA port on my ASUS P8Z68-V PRO. M.2? Neato, but... what's that? Lol.

    Up next, I would not mind a nice ol' 2 TB SSD to put the majority of my Steam games on, but I really don't have $1400 CAD to special order an 850 Pro (or Evo). Both of which are SATA, good luck with anything over M.2... I think the 960 Pro is like $1700 CAD?
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link

    To the both of you, just use an SM951 or SM961 on a PCIe adapter card. I get very good results with either model on my ASUS M4E, am about to move my main photo/video archive from a 500GB 850 EVO onto a 512GB SM961. I'm getting around 2GB/sec with the SM951, 3GB/sec with the SM961, and even more with SB-E mbds (3.5GB/sec on an R4E). In the UK where I am, the Akasa PCIe adapter card is only about 13 UKP, so the total cost is still less than mainstream SATA SSDs, though I did manage to get a 960 Pro 512GB for a good price for my R4E gaming setup.

    Also, the 950 Pro has its own boot ROM, so on older mbds you can use it as a boot drive via legacy BIOS settings. I know someone who's done this with their X79 and I plan on doing it with my own setups. Alas the 960 Pro does not have its own boot ROM so it can't be used in the same way by default. Other NVMe models also have their own boot ROM though, such as the Intel 750.

    Also, for ASUS X79 systems, there's a thread on the ROG site where a guy is posting modded BIOS files to allow various ASUS mbds to boot from any NVMe SSD, not just units like the 950 Pro. Thus, I plan on replacing my R4E's 850 Pro with a 960 Pro which was originally going to be just for game data alone.

    There's still plenty of life left in older mbds, much to the annoyance I'm sure of Intel and other vendors. :D Beats me though why Samsung didn't include a boot ROM in the 960, that was bizarre.

    PM/email me if you'd like screen captures of these SSDs being tested on various configs (so far mostly an M4E, R4E ans P9X79-E WS), ie. AS-SSD, CDM and Atto.

    Ian.
  • mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link

    Forgot to mention, I also plan on testing them with some P55 and X58 mbds, should be interesting, and perhaps a Striker II Extreme aswell if I have the time. Might try a couple of older AMD boards aswell, I have a few.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    -- Who is buying SATA SSDs in 2017

    most computers, modulo gamers and stats and RDBMS, don't do much more than e-mail and web surfing. the home PC reached good enough a decade ago. swapping spinning rust for just about any NAND device gets you as much improvement as a new i7 machine. I guess the idle rich would choose the latter, but the rest of us just get a SSD.
  • blahsaysblah - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Anyone see the size of the S700 and think a new plug-in format for SSDs is in order. Been wishing for vertical M.2. ports since they launched. 2280 is definitely shorter than any standard video card and 2242 would be easy to engineer so it cant be snapped off easily/accidentally.

    Just a row of SATA M.2 cards lined up not too close to video card. Or, six M.2 ports to replace the SATA ports normally on a board. Wish cables would go away sooner.
  • romrunning - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Sure, look at the U.2 connector. More enterprise use right now, but it's on some consumer boards as well. It can connect PCIe NVMe drives.
  • blahsaysblah - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Way too big. I dont understand why m.2 cant be made vertical, especially for a 2242 or 2230 sized card.

    Just plug in cards like DIMMs,...though i checked, they are only around 30-32mm high.

    No more cables, just plug the storage directly into motherboard.
  • Space Jam - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    >While the HP S700 and S700 Pro are not currently priced competitively, they do show that there's value in continued firmware tuning. More than a year after Micron's 32-layer 3D NAND hit the market, the HP S700 sets a new record for sequential read performance from a four-channel controller, and helps show that DRAMless SSDs can't be immediately dismissed from consideration.

    With the pricing being what it is this SSD is laughable. For me this is kind of a deathnail for the idea of DRAMless SSDs as it's not cheaper, which is the whole reason for sacrificing DRAM and stomaching a substantial performance differential. And its DRAM posting Pro-variant manages to tango with the better drives...by being significantly more expensive with a meager warranty; albeit with fairly generous write endurance ratings...not that that matters with performance dropping like a rock on both S700 and S700 Pro as it reaches full.

    The best I can say about the drive is that it isn't a HDD.
  • RaistlinZ - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Sorry Billy Tallis, but there's no reason to buy either of these SSD's. They cost MORE and perform WORSE than drives that have been out for a few years now.
  • StrangerGuy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    If could be that the only purpose of your massive failure of your product is to serve as a warning to others.
  • lilmoe - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    This is where i would normally complain that this is worthless and meaningless in the presence of the 850 evo. But this coming from hp might serve as a warning for ssd oems TO DROP THE DAMN PROCESS. I seriously hope that's the case, and i seriously hope other pc oems follow.

    As bad a this ssd looks, it would be a huge upgrade for anyone buying a laptop in the $400-600 range.
  • lilmoe - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    *PRICES
  • SanX - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Only high tech resellers salespeople here? In two decades I've never heard a word anyone discussed the manufacturing cost of anything at politically correct Anandtech and how rigged the component pricing is. Good example: manufacturing cost of flash was $1/GB in 2009. You will see true manufacturing cost only in the peaks of recessions. And now look at current $0.5/GB. Just factor of 2 progress in 8 years?... rotfl
  • ATC9001 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Can't hold a candle to the 850 Evo that's...3 years old now? And is more expensive...*Yawn* next.
  • superunknown98 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Did anyone else notice the ADATA SU800 512GB was faster than the HP S700 Pro 512GB for the majority of tests, yet the conclusion said the HP was faster? Granted the HP's of lesser size were faster than their counter parts.
  • petar_b - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link

    Useless drive. I wouldn't like that drive/controller in my server LOL... Even cheapest Crucial or Micron drives have DRAM at least....
  • morphix - Sunday, April 1, 2018 - link

    it's $115 for 512GB @walmart
  • portedbikes - Monday, February 25, 2019 - link

    I just had the most annoying failure ever with this HP Pro 512GB drive, formatted it and when trying to install W10 it just died and gave me an I/O device error, it will not be recognized by the bios if connected to a SATA port, but it will be recognized by windows if connected via USB with an enclosure, still not able to format it, or do anything with it, I/O Device error everytime... First and last time I buy one of these drives, they do not even come with trim software, I have never had a problem like this with Samsung, Intel, or PNY SSDs... first time I use HP and failed miserably... reading reviews on Amazon these drives fail as fast as 3 months to 1 year and HP warranty sucks. For $15 extra get an 860 Evo and call it a day, really not worth the savings.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now